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Philip Hook

on artists’ diaries

Oct. 3, 2014 12:48 p.m. ET

Painter of Passion

By Eugène Delacroix (1995)

1. Delacroix’s vivid and intelligent journals are among the great personal testimonies of art history. In his youth he takes the romantic’s feverish pleasure in chasing girls and in painting them: “I again had my key in the keyhole of my sweet Emilia,” he writes of his model in January 1824. “It in no way dampened my enthusiasm.” The impact that North Africa has on a European is perceptively described in the account of his first journey there. “There is beauty in everything they...